Introduction to
De Cive
by Jon Roland
Thomas Hobbes is better known for his Leviathan, but in many ways De
Cive (The Citizen) provides a more compact and systematic exposition of
his thought, in which natural law is derived from reason and biblical
doctrine, the social contract from natural law, and the forms of
government and duties of sovereign and citizen from the social contract.
Hobbes did not set out to challenge the legitimacy of monarchy or
aristocracy. John Locke, building on Hobbes' thought, would do that. As
such, Hobbesian theory, as far as it goes, can be used as the basis for
either constitutional republicanism or fascism. However, the notion of
the social contract is fundamental to all later political thought, and
must be seen as based on a human development model that makes it the
natural result of the emerging filial contract between parents and
children, which becomes the social contract when the child leaves the
care of the parents.
Hobbes extended the parent-child contract into a social contract between
sovereign and citizen, whereas Locke recognized that, although the
unequal relationship between parent and child was akin to that between
master and servant, the contract between parent and child did not
embrace that inequality of power, or legitimize it, so that when the
child comes of age and into an equality of power, the dominion ceases,
and the social contract remains, binding not only parent and child, but
the child to all those with whom the parent is bound in the social
contract, and by extension, to all those with whom those with whom one
is bound in the social contract are bound, as equal parties. This notion
of the transitivity of the social contract is implicit in the notions of
Hobbes and Locke, although neither of them recognized it explicitly.
They did not have the language to express the proposition that, if a, b,
and c are persons, and S is the relation of "being bound in a social
contract with", then a S b & b S c => a S c. This attribute provides the
basis for extension of the social contract to persons with whom one has
not dealt with directly, including past and future generations, and the
foundation for constitutional republican government.
For Hobbes and other natural law philosophers, natural law was not just
the principles according to which events occur, but also the natural
constraints on what is rational behavior for human beings, given their
natural attributes. Because human perception and reason are imperfect,
they do not always act according to what is thus rationally determined,
so the social contract is instituted to remedy those defects of
perception and reason, and to further alter the constraints on what
constitutes rational behavior through the establishment of laws and
their enforcement. The choice of such laws is itself a matter of
rational choice, given human nature and the human condition, so that
human beings, in society, play games, in the sense of game theory, at
two levels: the game determined by the chosen rules, and the game of
choosing the rules, that is, a metagame.
The political philosophers of the Enlightenment had faith in the
possibility of a science, and not just an art, of politics. That
possibility rests on the existence and discoverablity of optimal
strategies for that metagame, something which was intuitively perceived
by the philosophers, but which has awaited the advent of agent-based
computer simulation modeling to demonstrate.
Notes on editing decisions
This rendition is mainly based on the original 1651 edition, but with
some elements of the Molesworth edition. The spelling of words follows
the 1651 edition, with one exception: the word we now spell "than" was
spelled "then" by Hobbes. In this rendition the spelling is changed to
"than", as it was felt that the original spelling was confusing to
modern readers.
Some of the biblical references were corrected, and where Hobbes
separated a biblical chapter from a verse with only a comma, a colon has
been substituted, in accordance with more modern usage, to avoid
confusing chapter and verse numbers.